


The Billiard Ball

by Ailanthium



Category: Zero Escape (Video Games)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-05
Updated: 2019-12-05
Packaged: 2021-02-25 22:48:40
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21683236
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ailanthium/pseuds/Ailanthium
Relationships: Diana/Sigma Klim
Kudos: 5





	The Billiard Ball

My name is Sigma Klim.

I don’t get the luxury of living a simple, linear life. My mind has been sent through time and space, somewhere between here and now, then and there. Pieces of myself have been scattered behind me like breadcrumbs that lead to one inevitability after another. In the year 2028, my consciousness was flung into the far future, forced to participate in the ‘Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition’.

A game that I’ve been designing myself for the past forty-five years. It’s been a long, slow march toward a vague and murky goal. I know the game will succeed because I’ve already lived through it. In these final stages of the project, I’ve finally begun to steel myself for what’s to come.

In one timeline, I will fail. This failure will cost me both my arms and my right eye. My body alone is proof of that fact.

But in another, I may succeed.

That timeline is what I’ve been fighting for tooth and nail. Every morning I wake up with a new ache weighing heavy on my weathered body, and I get to work. Just to see the fruits of my labors. Just to see her again, even if she won’t recognize me.

Diana.

Those three years felt like a lifetime. The time I’ve spent away from her has felt like many more. For the first two-and-a-half decades after her death, I attempted to recreate her person as a GAULEM. Building her from my own imperfect memories. 

In the end, the person I created… wasn’t her at all. When I see Luna’s smile, it’s not Diana’s that beams back at me. I love Luna, but not as I loved Diana. I can only imagine it’s the same way a father might love his daughter for all the things she takes from her mother. And if Luna represents what I saw in Diana, then maybe I see too much of myself in Kyle. A spoiled brat who callously hurts the people around him.

Yeah, wonder where he got that from.

I’ve hardly acted like a human being around him, let alone a father. I was naive to think that having Luna act as his mother would help the situation. He brushed aside my greatest creation like she was worthless, like she meant nothing to him when she means everything to me. Have to be honest, that pissed me off. So I buried myself deeper and deeper into my research, further isolating myself from Kyle. I remember thinking what a shitty person K’s father must have been. Turns out it was me the whole time.

There’s something about the ‘Nonary Game: Ambidex Edition’ that both soothes me and haunts me. Time has dulled my memories, but as Akane and I complete its various systems, a growing sense of familiarity wells up within me. In those first few years, I remember wondering how all of this would come together. Now it just seems like the natural conclusion of everything I’ve ever done. When I record messages for my past self to see, I find myself mimicking the posture and inflections of ‘Zero Sr’ as I saw him back then. The voice of a mastermind carefully waiting for his plans to come to fruition. That person doesn’t feel like me at all.

So what came first, the chicken or the egg?

Imagine there’s a billiard ball rolling along a pool table. Before it can reach the other side, another billiard ball appears out of nowhere, giving it a glancing blow. Its trajectory changes and the first billiard ball finds itself entering a wormhole, traveling through time and space, only to reemerge seconds earlier—just in time to give itself the same glancing blow that forced it into a wormhole in the first place.

The way I see it, there’s no difference between myself and that billiard ball.

There’s something that analogy fails to address. What happens to that billiard ball after it gives itself the glancing blow? Where does its trajectory lead, if anywhere at all? That question… is one I intend to answer.


End file.
